eBay flash sale supported small businesses

Judging from everything we’ve heard about last weeks eBay CUKFLASH sale 20% off promotion which took place Thursday evening, it was a rip-roaring success.

We’ve heard from buyers who loved getting the discount but more importantly we’ve heard from sellers who benefited from buyers logging on to eBay to spend money. This is key, in the past eBay have done a lot to support large retailers and programs such as eBay deals don’t generally help smaller sellers. This time however it didn’t matter how small your business was, everyone had an equal shot of gaining business.

An important bonus for small businesses was that buyers could add multiple items from a selection of sellers and still get the 20% off discount. This means if they didn’t want to spend £250 with you, they could split their purchase between multiple sellers (which is what I ended up doing, I got a discount from three sellers on the day!).

eBay feedback on CUKFLASH sale

We’ve had some feedback from eBay who tell us:

• Customers loved the coupon; their reaction on social media was very positive – some saying that Black Friday had come early, some already buying Christmas presents.
• Huge numbers of customers got a bargain and sellers benefited from the event – and the busiest time for redemption was the first half hour and the last half hour of the deal.
• We saw strong interest across categories and with sellers big and small. It’s an important way for us to support sellers coming up to a very busy time of year.
• We’re committed to ensuring that the 200,000 businesses trading on eBay get the opportunity to benefit from buyer demand in the increasingly promotional period leading up to Christmas.
• We’re looking forward to surprising customers more promotional events in the future…

About the only thing eBay did wrong with this promotion, was not giving sellers more time to market it. Sellers could have ensure that their more expensive products were featured on their shop home page and of course the most obvious marketing for sellers would have been to send out eBay shop email marketing to encourage their previous buyers to revisit eBay.

VP of eBay UK Tanya Lawler told us “We were delighted to see so many customers getting a bargain, as well as our sellers benefiting from high volumes of traffic. We’re now looking forward to the big events at the end of this year to rocket fuel our sellers – like Black Friday and Christmas“.

As soon as we hear of eBay’s next big event we’ll make sure that Tamebay readers are amongst the first to know.